The Way of the Puffin

Travels in the Chinese century.

My fake-bird golf-club cover was the product of an industrial system that killed real birds. I wanted to visit its habitat.

Illustration by Joost Swarte

The puffin was a Christmas present from my brother Bob. It came in an unmarked plastic bag and appeared to be some sort of puppet or plush toy. It had a fleece-lined body and a big, orange, squeeze-inviting beak, and its eyes were set in triangles of black fur that lent it an expression of sorrow or anxiety or incipient disapproval. I warmed to the bird right away. I gave it a funny voice and personality and used it to entertain the Californian I live with. I sent Bob an enthusiastic thank-you note, in reply to which he informed me that the puffin was not a toy at all but a golf accessory. He’d bought it in the pro shop at Bandon Dunes, a golf resort in southwest Oregon, to remind me of the fun I could have golfing and birding in Oregon, where he lives. The puffin was a head cover for a golf driver.

My difficulty with golf is that, although I play it once or twice a year to be sociable, I dislike almost everything about it. The point of the game seems to be the methodical euthanizing of workday-sized chunks of time by well-off white men. Golf eats land, drinks water, displaces wildlife, fosters sprawl. I dislike the self-congratulations of its etiquette, the self-important hush of its television analysts. Most of all, I dislike how badly I play the game. Spelled backward, golf is flog.

I do own a cheap set of clubs, but there was no way I was going to impale my puffin on one of them. For one thing, the Californian had taken to clutching it in bed every night. The puffin had quickly established itself as a minor household character. Out in the world of nature, real puffins (and many other pelagic birds) were suffering badly from overfishing of the oceans and degradation of their nest sites, but nature could be a cold and abstract thing to love from the middle of New York City. The toy was furry and immediate.

In Jane Smiley’s novel “The Greenlanders,” there’s a tale about a Norse farmer who brings a polar-bear cub into his house and raises it as his son. Although the bear learns to read, it can’t help remaining a bear, with a bear’s huge appetite, and eventually it begins to eat up all the farmer’s sheep. The farmer knows he has to get rid of the bear, but he can never quite bring himself to do it, because (according to the story’s refrain) the bear has such beautiful soft fur and such beautiful dark eyes. Metaphorically, for Smiley, the bear represents a destructive passion too pleasurable to resist. But the story also works as a straightforward warning about sentimental idolatry. Homo sapiens is the animal that wants to believe, in defiance of harsh natural law, that other animals are part of its family. I could make a pretty good ethical argument for our responsibility to other species, and yet I wondered whether, at root, my concern for biodiversity and animal welfare might be a kind of regression to my childhood bedroom and its community of plush toys: a fantasy of cuddliness and interspecies harmony. Smiley’s smitten farmer is finally driven to offer the flesh of his own arm to his insatiable bear-child.

Late last fall, while the Times was running a series of long articles about the crisis of pollution, water shortages, desertification, species loss, and deforestation in China and I was managing to read no more than fifty words of any of them, a great new Jeep commercial was airing during football games. You know: the one where a squirrel, a wolf, two horned larks, and an S.U.V. driver join together in song while rolling down an empty highway through pristine forest. I especially enjoyed the moment when the wolf gulps down one of the larks, receives a disapproving look from the S.U.V. driver, spits the lark back out unharmed, and bursts into song. I knew perfectly well that S.U.V.s were even more hostile to horned larks than wolves were; I knew that my domestic appetites were part of the same beast that was devouring the natural world in China and elsewhere in Asia; and yet I loved the Jeep ad. I loved the worried eyes and soft fur of my golf accessory. I didn’t want to know what I knew. And yet: I couldn’t stand not knowing, either. One afternoon, with a kind of grim foreboding, I went to the bedroom and grabbed the puffin by its wings and stuck it underneath a bright lamp and turned it inside out, and there, sure enough, was the label: “HANDMADE IN CHINA.”

I decided to visit the part of the world where the puffin came from. The industrial system that had created the fake bird was destroying real birds, and I wanted to be in a place where this connection couldn’t be concealed. Basically, I wanted to know how bad things were.

I called up the American company on the puffin’s label—Daphne’s Headcovers, of Phoenix, Arizona—and spoke to its president, Jane Spicer. I was afraid she’d be reticent about her Chinese sources, especially in light of the recent Chinese toy scandals, but she was the opposite of reticent. In our first phone conversation, she told me about her golden retriever, Aspen, her found cat, Mango, her late mother, Daphne (with whom, at the age of ten, she’d started the company), her husband, Steve, who ran the production end of things, and her most famous customer, Tiger Woods, whose furry tiger head cover, nicknamed Frank, had co-starred in a series of Nike television ads in 2003 and 2004. She told me that Daphne, herself an immigrant from England, had made a point of hiring immigrants to sew the head covers, and that she, Jane, had once lent some workers to a woman who manufactured cat toys and had lost her own workers and was desperate to get her orders filled, and that, years later, in the mysterious way of karma, after the woman had struck it rich and Jane had forgotten all about her, she’d called up Jane and said, “Remember me? You saved my business. I’ve been looking for a way to repay you, and I’d like you to meet some friends of mine from China.”

Daphne’s is the world leader in animal head covers. When I went to visit its headquarters, in Phoenix, Jane introduced me to workers she referred to as “the zoo crew,” who inspect the head covers and sort them by species in plastic-lined boxes. She helped me locate the puffins, which, piled in their box, looked about as cute and animate as laundry. In the sample room, she showed me boxes of knockoffs with sheaves of legal documents stacked on top. “The vast majority of our lawsuits are against American companies,” she said. “Often the Chinese manufacturers don’t even know they’re infringing.” Her tiger and her gopher (with its “Caddyshack” associations) were especially popular targets of intellectual piracy. There was also a walrus head cover made from the dense brown pelt of some actual animal. “This should still be on the animal that wore it,” Jane said severely. “Karma’s going to get the guy who did this, but our attorney’s going to get him first.”

When I asked her if I could possibly meet with her suppliers in China, Jane said maybe. She wanted me to know, in any case, that the suppliers’ workers in China were averaging twice or nearly twice the local minimum wage. “We wanted to pay for perfection,” she said, “and we wanted good karma there—wanted happy workers in a happy factory.” She and Steve still do some design, but they’ve come to trust their Chinese partners to do more and more of it. Steve can e-mail a sketch from Phoenix and have a fur prototype in hand a week later. When he travels to China, the team there can produce a prototype before lunch and a revised prototype by the end of the workday. Language is mostly not a problem, although Steve did have trouble explaining a gray whale’s “barnacles” to the Chinese team, and an employee once came to him with a strange question: “You said you want all the animals to be angry. Why?” Steve replied that, no, to the contrary, he and Jane wanted their animals to look happy and to make people happy to touch them. The word that had been mistranslated as “angry” was “realistic.”

“Work first, then pleasure,” David Xu cheerfully admonished me on my first official day in China. Xu was from the foreign-affairs office in the booming city of Ningbo, a hundred miles due south of Shanghai, and our “work” consisted of racing from one factory to another in a hired van. From the back of the van, it seemed to me that every inch of greater Ningbo was under construction or reconstruction simultaneously. My extremely new hotel had been built in the rear yard of a merely very new hotel, a few feet away. The roads were modern but heavily divoted, as if it were understood that they would all be torn up again soon anyway. The countryside seethed with improvement; in some villages, it was hard to find a house that didn’t have a pile of sand or a stack of bricks in front of it. Farm fields were sprouting factories while, outside the less new factories, the support columns of coming viaducts went up behind scaffolds. The growth rate that Ningbo had sustained in recent years—about fourteen per cent—quickly became exhausting just to look at.

As if to reënergize me, Xu twisted around in the front seat and emphasized, with a big smile, that “China is a developing country.” Xu’s teeth were beautiful. He had the fashionably angular eyeglasses and ingratiating eagerness of an untenured literature professor, and he was charming and frank on every imaginable subject—our driver’s lack of basic road skills, the long and eventful history of homosexuality in China, the uncanny suddenness with which old neighborhoods in Ningbo were razed and replaced. Xu had also graciously refrained from asking me what I had been doing in China between my arrival in Shanghai seven days earlier and my official arrival in Ningbo the afternoon before. To repay this kindness, I tried to show keen interest in even the most obviously unrepresentative factories he took me to, such as the automobile-maker Geely, a proud pioneer of green manufacturing methods like “water melt” body paint (“ ‘Green’ means friendly to the environment,” Xu said), and the heavy-equipment manufacturer Haitian, where workers typically took home nine thousand dollars a year (Xu: “That’s twice what I make!”) and many of them commuted in private cars.

The after-work treat that Xu had promised me was a V.I.P. tour of the almost finished Hangzhou Bay Bridge—at thirty-six kilometres, the longest sea-crossing bridge in the world. Before we got there, however, we needed to watch all-terrain-vehicle body parts being spray-painted and motorcycle wheels being milled and acrylic “cotton” fibre being extruded and ingeniously processed in the thriving municipality of Cixi, where exports last year totalled four billion dollars, and there are twenty thousand private companies and only one state-owned enterprise, and so many locals own or manage factories that the resident population is nearly equalled by the population of migrant workers who do the ordinary jobs. At the acrylic-fibre plant, the four young migrant workers manning the command center might have been borrowed from a tenth-grade home room. They sat gazing at flat-panel screens aglow with flowcharts and streaming data, two boys and two girls in casual school clothes, communicating nothing so much as a wish to be left alone.

The sun was setting by the time we got to the Hangzhou Bay Bridge. Most of its total cost (about $1.7 billion) had been covered by the government of Ningbo, which was platting out a vast new industrial zone immediately to the east. The bridge will cut the driving time between Shanghai and Ningbo in half; after it officially opens, in May, the Olympic torch will be carried across it, bound for Beijing and the Green Olympics. On our drive out and back, the only animal or plant life I saw was a pair of gulls flying rapidly away. Every five kilometres, to combat monotony, the color of the railings changed. At the bridge’s midpoint, I got out and surveyed the turbid gray tide running against concrete piers on which a wayside restaurant and hotel were being built. I found myself aching to see more birds, any birds.

According to my visa application, the purpose of my trip to Ningbo was to explore the subject of Chinese manufacturing for American export, but I had taken care to let Xu know that I was very interested in birds as well. Now, trying to please me and to make our day complete, he directed our driver west from the bridge into a system of reed beds and ponds which the Cixi government had preserved as a natural area. Much of the area had recently burned, and all of it was being considered, Xu said, for conversion to a “wetland park.”

I’d seen one of these wetland parks in Shanghai, earlier in the week. I did my best to sound enthusiastic.

“Red-crowned cranes are commonly seen here,” Xu assured me from the front seat. “The government is planting trees to help shelter the birds from the elements.”

I had the feeling that he was improvising a little bit, but I was grateful for the effort. We drove past tidal flats of such barrenness that they appeared to predate multicellular life. We crossed over a broad canal on which I thought I glimpsed four sitting ducks or grebes, but they were only plastic bottles. We passed an “eco-farm” consisting of fish ponds surrounded by vacation cottages. Finally, in failing light, we roused a flock of night herons from a densely vegetated marsh. We got out of the van and stood watching as they circled and drifted closer to us. David Xu was beside himself with joy. “Jonathan!” he cried. “They know you’re a bird-watcher! They’re welcoming you!”

The week before, when I’d arrived in Shanghai, my first impression of China had been that it was the most advanced place I’d ever seen. The scale of Shanghai, which from the sky had presented a dead-flat vista of tens of thousands of neatly arrayed oblong houses— each of which, a closer look revealed, was in fact a large apartment block—and then, on the ground, the brutally new skyscrapers and the pedestrian-hostile streets and the artificial dusk of the smoke-filled winter sky: it was all thrilling. It was as if the gods of world history had asked, “Does somebody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?” and this place had raised its hand and said, “Yeah!”

One afternoon, I’d ridden north from Shanghai in a rented car with three homegrown Chinese bird-watchers. The artificial dusk had been gathering for hours, but night didn’t actually fall until the moment we all piled out of the car, on the fringes of Yancheng National Nature Reserve, and followed the bird guide known as M. Caribou down a little farm road. The temperature was below freezing. The only colors were various dark bluish grays. An utterly unidentifiable bird flushed out of some weeds and flew deeper into the night.

“Some kind of bunting,” Caribou speculated.

“It’s pretty dark,” I said, shivering.

“We want to use the last light,” the very attractive young woman who called herself Stinky said.

It got even darker. Right in front of me, the young man named Shadow flushed what he said was a pheasant. I heard it and looked around wildly, trying to distinguish shapes. Caribou was leading us past the car, where our hired driver sat with the heat blasting. We ran blindly down an embankment into a grove of sticklike trees whose pale bark made the undergrowth even darker.

“And what are we doing here?” I said.

“Could be woodcock,” Caribou said. “They like wet ground where the trees aren’t too close together.”

We crashed around in the dark, hoping for woodcock. Up on the road, thirty feet away from us, minibuses and small trucks rushed by, swerving and honking and raising dust that I tasted but couldn’t see. We stopped and listened intently to a twittering song that turned out to be the bearings of an approaching bicycle.

Stinky and Shadow and M. Caribou all went by their Web names when speaking English. Stinky was the mother of a five-year-old and had taken up birding two years ago. Via e-mail, she and I had arranged to visit Yancheng, the largest nature reserve on the Chinese coast, and she had talked me into avoiding official guidance and employing her friend Caribou, who charged seventy dollars a day to find birds. I’d asked Stinky if she really wanted me to call her Stinky, and she’d said yes. She’d come to my hotel wearing a black fleece hat, a nylon shell, and nylon adventure pants. Her friend Shadow, a biology student with a borrowed wildlife camera and time on his hands, was dressed in a down parka and thin corduroys. The first half of our drive took us up through the heart of the Yangtze River Delta, which had lately accounted for nearly twenty per cent of China’s G.D.P. One vast plain of industry and medium-rise housing and isolated shards of agriculture was succeeded by another. Always, on the southern horizon, mirage-like in the winter light, was some mythically outsized structure—some power plant, some glass-clad temple of finance, some steroidally bulked-up restaurant-hotel complex, some . . . grain elevator?

Caribou, in the front seat, was scanning the sky with a vaguely irritable alertness. “The word ‘eco’ is very popular in China now, you see it everywhere,” he commented. “But it’s not real eco.”

“There was no birding at all in China until four or five years ago,” Stinky said.

“No—longer,” Shadow said. “Ten years!”

“But only four or five years in Shanghai,” Stinky said.

North of the Yangtze, in the region known as Subei, we drove through crowded, run-down urban outskirts for a long time before I understood that these weren’t outskirts, this was just what Subei looked like. The houses were blocky, unpainted, blatant; only in the rooflines, which never failed to end in a vestigial Far Eastern upturning, was there a breath of aesthetic relief. We drove alongside canals frosted with thick layers of floating trash and lined on either side with even thicker deposits; white and red were the leading trash colors, but there existed sun-bleached plastic equivalents of every other major color as well. Very rarely did I see a tree more than eight inches in diameter. Vegetables were planted in tight rows on road embankments, in the aisles between the regiments of stick trees, on traffic triangles, and right up to the walls of every building.

When even Caribou had admitted that night had fallen, we left the reserve and drove into the village of Xinyanggang. The buildings there were two-story and made of unadorned concrete or brick. The light consisted mainly of spillage from low-wattage fixtures inside open-fronted stores. Over dinner, in a room where a ceiling-mounted heater blew freezing air, Caribou told me how he’d come to be one of the first professional bird guides born in the People’s Republic. As a kid, he said, he’d liked animals, and as a college student he’d sometimes sketched birds and e-mailed his nature notes to his classmates. But it was impossible to be a real bird-watcher without a complete, illustrated field guide to Chinese birds, and the first of these, by John MacKinnon and Karen Phillipps, wasn’t published until 2000. Caribou bought his copy in 2001. Two years later, he took a job as an air-traffic controller in Shanghai. “It was a great job,” Stinky told me. But Caribou himself hadn’t thought so. He’d hated the long nights and the constant arguing with pilots and airline directors; he’d even had to argue with passengers who called him on their cell phones. His biggest complaint, though, was that the job was incompatible with full-time birding. “Sometimes, for a week or even two weeks,” he said, “I wouldn’t get any sleep at all, it was just birding and work.”

“But you could fly to other cities for free!” Stinky said.

This was true, Caribou admitted. But his schedule had never allowed him more than one full day in any given city, and so he’d quit. For the last two and a half years, he’d made his living as a freelance bird researcher and guide. Stinky, who had recently discovered Facebook, was trying to get Caribou to set up a page to advertise himself abroad. A lot of Europeans and Americans, she said, were unaware that there was even such a thing as Chinese bird-watchers, let alone Chinese bird guides. When I asked Caribou how many days he’d worked as a guide in 2007, he frowned and calculated. “Less than fifteen,” he said.

At six-thirty the next morning, after stopping for a breakfast of noodles and rice buns filled with savory greens, Stinky and Shadow and Caribou and I headed back to the reserve. Like many Chinese reserves, Yancheng is divided into a highly protected “core area” and a larger “outer area,” where visitors with binoculars are tolerated and local people are permitted to live and work. There is very little pristine habitat anywhere in eastern China and certainly none to be seen in Yancheng. Every last hectare of the outer area seemed to be in use for fish-farming, paddy-building, road-grading, ditch-digging, reed-cutting, house-rebuilding, and miscellaneous major earthmoving and concrete-pouring. Caribou led us to red-crowned cranes (bushy-tailed, majestic, endangered), reed parrotbills (tiny, funny-faced, threatened), and, by my count, seventy-four other species of bird. We searched for buntings along a channel that was being widened and paved by a brigade of workers who buzzed up on motorcycles and asked if we were hunting pheasants. This is a common question in China, where birders also get used to being mistaken for surveyors, to being informed, “There are no birds here,” and to being asked, “Is the bird you’re looking at expensive?”

We saw a Chinese gray shrike near a billboard ominously urging “DEVELOP THE LAND, PRESERVE THE WETLANDS, CONTRIBUTE TO THE ECONOMY” and a peasant digging a barn foundation with a shovel. We invaded the yard of a family that had come outside to watch two men tinker with an electrical substation while, twenty feet away, near a pile of cinder blocks, a fantastic, prison-striped, crazily crested hoopoe foraged in dead grass. At the site of a reservoir where, just two months earlier, Caribou had seen waterfowl, we pulled up face to face with a very handsome man who sat straddling his motorcycle, a woman at his side, and smiled at us implacably while Caribou determined that the site had been bulldozed for fish-farming and was now devoid of birds. We ended the day by combing through trees and brush near the reserve’s tourist center. Here, for free, on one side of the road, you could see a solitary ostrich, while, on the other side, for four dollars, you could see a few tame red-crowned cranes, listless in a pen, with yellow grass and dirty water, and climb a tower from which the reserve’s core area was distantly visible.

“It’s a wasteland, not a wetland,” Caribou said bitterly, of the visitor center. “The problem with nature reserves in China is that local people don’t support them. People who live near them think, We can’t get richer, we can’t build factories, we can’t build power plants, because of the protections. They don’t know what a reserve is, or what a wetland is. Yancheng should open part of the core area to the public, to get them interested. To help them get to know the red-crowned crane. Then they can support it.”

The fine for trespassing in the core area is nominally forty dollars but can run as high as seven hundred dollars, depending on the mood of the policeman. In theory, the core area is closed in order to minimize human disturbance to rare migratory birds, but if you were to go ahead and enter it anyway, some morning in late February, you would see long, loud convoys of blue trucks bouncing down networks of dirt roads in clouds of dust and diesel exhaust. The trucks go in empty and come out stacked house-high and road-wide with harvested reeds. You’d have an easy time finding threatened species like the reed parrotbill, because their populations are driven into narrow strips of vegetation beside vast mud flats—square miles of them, stretching to the horizon—that have been clear-cut to the ground. If you’re lucky, you might also see one of the world’s two thousand or so remaining black-faced spoonbills, feeding in shallow water alongside endangered Oriental storks and endangered cranes, while, on a spit of land directly behind them, workers pitch bundles of reed onto a truck.

According to an administrator at the reserve, local regulations allow reeds to be cut before and after migratory birds come through. When the reserve was established, in the nineteen-eighties, the central government hadn’t given it enough funds to operate, and it had charged peasants a fee to cut reeds; nowadays, the cutting is justified as a fire-prevention measure. “Global N.G.O.s want China to do conservation the Western way, but they don’t want every Chinese to drive a car,” the director of another coastal reserve told me. “That’s why we have to do things the Chinese way.” It wasn’t obvious to me that fire posed a greater risk to Yancheng’s red-crowned cranes than the semiannual clear-cutting of the core area, but I knew that much of China still operates under the national watchword of the eighties, “Development first, then environment.” I asked Caribou if, as China’s economy continued to expand, things were simply going to get worse for birds.

“Definitely,” Caribou said. He listed some of the species—Baikal teal, scaly-sided merganser, Baer’s pochard, black-headed ibis, Japanese yellow bunting, hooded crane—that bred or wintered in eastern China and were disappearing. “Even just ten years ago, you could see much bigger numbers of them,” he said. “The problem isn’t just poaching. The biggest problem is habitat loss.”

“It’s a trend, there’s nothing we can do about it,” Stinky said.

Down the road from the visitor center, in near-darkness, Shadow called out that he’d found four teals and a snipe.

Stinky was officially looking for a job in marketing or P.R., but she wanted a job that didn’t require overtime, and in China nowadays every job required overtime. She and her husband had lived for two years in the United States. Although they’d ultimately found life there too boring and predictable, compared with China, they now felt less “flexible” than the friends of theirs who never left. “It’s a little harder for the two of us to abandon our principles,” Stinky said. “For example, in both China and the U.S., people say that family is the No. 1 priority. But in the U.S. they really mean it. In China, everything is about career now and getting ahead.” She and her husband had already bought a retirement apartment in the Sichuanese city of Chengdu, where people have a reputation for knowing how to relax and enjoy life, but for now the husband was working long hours in the city of Suzhou and getting home to Shanghai only a few nights a week, and Stinky was scarcely less industrious in pursuing her new hobby. In the two years since she’d gone on a walk sponsored by the Shanghai Wild Bird Society, she’d kept financial records for the society, managed several of its outreach projects, become an active online poster of local bird counts, and, last summer, in Fujian Province, seen one of the world’s rarest species, the Chinese crested tern.

I joined her on a Sunday morning at the annual meeting of the Shanghai Wild Bird Society. Forty members, including a dozen women, had gathered in a classroom on the nineteenth floor of a Forestry Bureau building. It was easy to spot the newest members—they were the shy ones trading little glossy stickers of common birds. Stinky, in stylish black jeans, her hair thick and loose on her shoulders, detached herself from a cluster of friends and gave a clear, polished financial report, using spreadsheets decorated with a cartoon of coins tumbling into a cute-faced piggy bank. (Funding in 2007 had consisted primarily of a nine-hundred-dollar gift from the Hong Kong Bird Society to pay for Shanghai’s annual birding festival.) This year, for the first time, the society’s board of directors was being elected directly by the membership rather than being appointed by its governmental sponsor, the Shanghai Wild Animal Protection Bureau. An older member stood up to offer roastlike mini-bios of nine nominees, including “a supermodel” (Stinky), “a student who is extremely young” (Shadow), and “a nice guy, very easygoing” (the best amateur birder in Shanghai). Members smiled for a camera as, one by one, with half-joking ceremony, they dropped pink ballots into a slotted box.

China’s political system does not allow for an environmental movement in the Western, activist, integrated sense of “movement.” The Three Gorges dam, on the Yangtze, did generate something close to an organized national resistance, but this was partly because the government itself was divided about the project and because the dam became a rallying point for political discontents in general. The government was recently shamed into addressing the pollution of Tai Lake, near the city of Wuxi, but not because of the noisy citizen (subsequently jailed) who’d blown the whistle on the problem; it was because an algal bloom had fouled Wuxi’s water supply. China does have a number of prominent and outspoken environmental activists, many of them former journalists, and private citizens frequently mount NIMBY protests against specific environmental threats. But the dynamic of activists-versus-officialdom is less important than the tension between the government in Beijing, which is committed in principle to strong environmental protection, and the unequivocally pro-growth local and provincial governments. Non-governmental organizations, such as the Shanghai Wild Bird Society, are not permitted to form alliances or to take direction from a national group, and each one needs a governmental sponsor. They’re a bit like what our local Audubon chapters would be if there were no national groups to the left of them—no Sierra Club agitating in Washington. Nearly all are less than ten years old, and their mission thus far is primarily educational.

Western-style conservation protests, when they do occur, are usually ad hoc, local, and ineffective. Until four years ago, the Jiangwan Wetland—eight square kilometres of diverse habitat on the site of an abandoned military airport—had been the largest natural space in central Shanghai and a magnet for local birders. When the birders learned that it was going to be developed for housing, they teamed up with local researchers, petitioned the government to abandon or modify the project, and enlisted journalists to publicize their campaign. In response, the government set aside a postage stamp of wetland on which, in Caribou’s disdainful words, “you might see some blackbirds, or a little egret.” Otherwise, the development had proceeded as planned.

Stinky was the leading vote-getter in the board election, mentioned on thirty-eight of the forty ballots. Extremely young Shadow was one of the two nonqualifiers. After a buffet lunch, we watched a slide show by Shanghai’s nice and very easygoing best local birder, who’d recently been travelling in the lushly biodiverse province of Yunnan. (“Here,” he said, clicking, “I was attacked by a leech.”) Stinky was watching the presentation raptly. She herself was about to embark on a two-week birding expedition in Yunnan, leaving behind her husband and her daughter, bringing along Caribou, and hoping to see at least a hundred bird species she hadn’t seen before. I’d asked her how her husband felt about her hobby. “He thinks I’m having all the fun,” she said.

From the classroom windows, I could see the upper half of the Jin Mao Tower—the half that housed the hotel I was staying in. The Jin Mao had been the fifth-tallest building in the world until a few months ago, when the much taller Shanghai World Financial Center went up across the street, beginning a reign as Asia’s Tallest Building which will last until the year after next, when an even taller building is scheduled to go up nearby. In my hotel room, on the seventy-seventh floor, with my eye attuned to sourcing and the sky in my windows white with coal smog, each gleaming fixture invited me to consider the energy required to extract its raw materials, process them, haul them to Shanghai, and hoist them nine hundred-and-something feet above the ground. The cut and polished marble, the melted glass, the plated steel. After the cold and dark of Subei, the room seemed to me outrageously luxurious, except for the tap water, which guests were advised not to drink.

“Whatever species you can’t find in the forest,” the top birder in Shanghai quipped, “you can go to the local market and see in a cage.”

Two young men at the meeting, Yifei Zhang and Max Li, offered to show me around the Yangtze estuary the next day. Yifei was a slender, fine-featured former journalist now working for the World Wildlife Fund in Shanghai. Max was a Shanghai native who’d gone to Swarthmore to study engineering and come home as a vegan bird-watcher pursuing a career in ecology. (“I try, but it’s hopeless to be a vegan here,” Max said while he bought us a breakfast of omelettes from a street vender.) After a morning at a nature reserve on Chongming Island, Yifei and Max wanted me to see a wetland park on the outskirts of Shanghai. To Chinese conservationists, the phrase “wetland park” has approximately the same valence as “petting zoo.” These parks typically consist of dredged ponds and photogenic islands crisscrossed by wide wooden promenades repellent to birds. The park in Shanghai was adjacent to a military base whose firing range was so loud and close that the salvos sounded like a video arcade; I saw a tracer round cross the sky over our heads. There were also colored spotlights, fake boulders emitting Chinese pop music, and dense rectilinear plantings of pansies. Yifei looked down at the pansies and said, “Stupid.”

We crossed the Yangtze in an old, slow ferry. The waters were the color of wet cement mix. As we approached the shore, hundreds of passengers pressed against the ferry’s bulkheads, trying to squeeze through small doors, onto a narrow platform, and down a set of steep, narrow metal stairs. Although I liked the country’s pace—the Chinese empty out of jetliners wonderfully fast, and Chinese elevator doors are hair-triggered—I didn’t appreciate being jostled so close to ladder-like stairs. I was used to crowds in New York City, but not crowds like this. One difference was the alacrity with which the tiniest advantage was seized, the slightest hesitation exploited. Even more striking, though, was the self-blinkering angle at which the women pushing around me (they were mostly women) held their heads. It was the angle of looking at the ground exactly one step ahead, and the effect was not to make me feel challenged or resented (the sort of thing that raised my blood pressure on the Lexington Avenue line) but to render me somehow inanimate. I was nothing more than an obstacle dimly sensed.

I asked Max and Yifei about the seeming indifference of most private citizens in China to the environmental crisis, especially regarding wildlife.

“There’s a long cultural tradition here of living in ‘harmony with nature,’ ” Max said. “Those ideas persisted for thousands of years, and they can’t have just evaporated. They’re just temporarily lost in this generation. Under Mao, all sorts of traditional values were broken down. So now all people think is, I just want to get rich. The richer you get, the more respect you’ll get. And the first people to get really rich, in the nineties, were the Cantonese. Then people in other provinces started to copy the Cantonese life style, part of which is to eat a lot of seafood to show off how much money you have.”

“We don’t have enough researchers studying what’s happening environmentally,” Yifei said. “And the researchers we do have don’t speak up. In all the bureaus, even at the Academy of Science, everybody is just thinking about how to say the right thing to please his boss. Instead of real information, there’s a lot of fake information—you know, ‘China has a wealth of natural resources.’ The country’s general trend is good—toward greater intellectual freedom—but it’s still very limited. So, finally, everyone just cares about what he can get for himself. The goal becomes personal survival.”

In Ningbo, I’d asked to see a golf-club factory, and the tireless, beautifully smiling David Xu had granted my wish. Xu was on the phone with the company president until the very minute we arrived at the factory, reassuring him that I really was a writer and that he, Xu, really did work in the foreign-affairs office. The year before, one of the company’s competitors had sent spies to the factory in the guise of journalists.

Modern golf clubs may look ultra-high-tech, but they’re irreducibly labor-intensive to make. The factory in Ningbo employed about five hundred workers, most of them from central and western China. They lived in the factory dormitory, they ate in the factory cafeteria, and, according to the company’s young sales manager, Lawyrance Luo, they generally didn’t understand much about the items they were making. Luo said that he himself went golfing only a few times a year, when the company had new products to test. Most of the clubs the factory produced were sold in sets, complete with bulky bag, at big retail outlets in America.

The factory’s bare concrete and basic lighting could have been one year old or fifty years old. Ditto the grease-blackened machines, operated by male workers, that rolled raw steel tubing into a taper and pressed neat rings of crimp into the resulting shaft. Female workers painted glue onto strips of graphite composite which were then rolled onto the shafts and heat-bonded to them. One heavy-duty machine stamped sheet steel into hollow driver heads; on either side of a different machine, two men used tweezers to insert and remove driver faces into which the machine pressed horizontal grooves. After stamping, the driver heads were milled in a dimly lit room full of water-cooled grinding machines and well-muscled men in masks; Luo assured me that the water here was recycled and the ventilation much better than it used to be, but the scene was still pretty infernal. Upstairs, in a room filled with shockingly intense paint fumes, tough-looking girls with big hair and extreme boots and stockings were inspecting the finish on driver shafts and buffing away small flaws. Other young people sandblasted clubheads, applied decals to shafts, hand-tinted the grooves of logos, and injected glue into driver heads to keep the residual grit in them from rattling. In a crowded ground-floor space where the finished product piled up, forests of shiny clubheads loomed above ridges of colorful bags and wide reed beds in which the stems were shafts and the heads of the reeds were cushioned grips.

Like China’s nature reserves, this factory was hemmed in by difficulties. The company payroll, currently averaging about two hundred dollars a month per worker, was rising every year, and there were new federal laws that, in theory at least, increased the minimum wage and required companies to give insurance and severance pay to all but their short-term workers. Because the central government was also bent on developing the country’s interior, employers in coastal cities like Ningbo had to offer ever greater incentives to lure workers from home and retain them. Meanwhile, China’s export tax credit had been made less generous, raw-material costs were increasing month by month, the American economy was slackening, the American dollar was a dog, and yet the factory couldn’t pass along its increased costs to its customers—the American buyers would simply go to another factory.

“Our profit margin has become very, very small,” Luo said. “It’s the same as when the Taiwanese manufacturers moved over here ten years ago. We see more and more businesses moving to Vietnam now.”

“Vietnam is very small,” David Xu countered with an intense smile.

By the front door, as we were leaving, we came upon an enormous golf bag filled with plastic-wrapped clubs.

“These are the best clubs we make,” Luo told me. “The top of the line. The president wants you to have them as a gift, because of your interest in golf.”

I looked at Xu and at my translator, Miss Wang, but neither was able to give me a clear sign of what to do. As in a dream, I watched the clubs being loaded into the rear of our van. I watched the door being closed. Surely some well-known rule of journalistic ethics applied here?

“Oh, I don’t know about this,” I said. “I’m not at all sure about this.”

The next thing I knew, Luo was waving goodbye and we were driving off into the late-morning haze. A strong, warm, smoke-laden wind had kicked up; the air was suddenly very bad. I thought I might have accomplished a refusal of the gift if only I’d felt more sure about business etiquette in China. Admittedly, though, I’d been further paralyzed, at the critical moment, by the tastiness of the phrase “top of the line” and by the thought of handling those glossy, sexy, late-model golf clubs; the extended factory tour had given me an appetite for finished product. Only now was it occurring to me that there was a lot of schlepping between Ningbo and New York. Plus: after accepting such a handsome gift, wouldn’t it be rude of me to write about the intense workplace paint fumes? Plus: didn’t I dislike golf?

“I’m thinking we should go back and return the clubs,” I said. “Could we do that? Would the president be offended?”

“Jonathan, you must keep the clubs,” Xu said. He didn’t sound entirely sure of himself, though. I explained what a bother it was to travel with excess luggage, and Miss Wang, who was not much bigger than the bag of clubs, offered to carry them back to Shanghai for me and store them until I flew home. “I need to lose weight,” she said.

“They will be a memento of your trip,” Xu said.

“You should definitely keep them,” Miss Wang agreed.

I was thinking of the trip I’d made to Oregon a month earlier. On the occasion of a major birthday of my brother’s, I’d finally gone with him to Bandon Dunes. I’d seen baskets of worried-looking puffins in the pro shop, and I’d butchered, with growing impatience, eighteen gorgeous golf holes while Bob was sinking putts that seemed to cross two county lines. To get to Bandon from Bob’s house, we’d taken Portland’s light-rail line to the airport. If you want to feel radiantly white, male, and leisured, you can hardly do better than to trouble an ethnically diverse crowd of working people to step around your golf bags during morning rush hour.

I told David Xu that I wanted to make a present of my new clubs to him. He protested: “I’ve never in my life touched the gate of a golf course!” In the end, though, he had little choice but to accept. “It will help me remember you,” he said philosophically. “It will be a wonderful, colorful spice to my life.”

Among thousands of recent postings on the Web site of the Jiangsu Wild Bird Society—based in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, which neighbors Shanghai—is a thread that began when a newcomer to the group, Xiaoxiaoge, posted bird pictures that he’d taken at a zoo and was roundly reprimanded for it. Xiaoxiaoge fired back:

I never heard of any animal-protection organization expressing a negative opinion of zoos. . . . Aren’t so-called “wild animal preserves” just a place set up to “imprison” animals to protect them?
He continued:

Aren’t zoos the only place one can take pictures of birds with a simple camera from close up? Otherwise, you have to spend thousands [on camera equipment] to take pictures of birds, and then isn’t it like an upper-class activity? . . . These people get caught up in the pleasure of the birds’ beauty and cannot get out of it; they all get caught in the pleasure of finding a new species somewhere and cannot get out of it.

If bird-watchers truly cared about birds, Xiaoxiaoge wrote, they would spend less energy on making pretty images and more time defending nature against human threats.

In reply to Xiaoxiaoge, one poster pointed out that Nanjing’s very first birder had

used an average set of binoculars, 200 yuan, to watch birds, and he became a nationally known expert. He insisted on using those binoculars for five years, until he finally traded them for new ones this year.
Another poster took the opportunity to lament the profit motive at Chinese zoos:

Go to Western zoos and you will realize that animals in real zoos have a much better life than in the wild. Recently, I’ve talked with people who’ve come back from overseas or friends from overseas, and I feel even more strongly that the gap in our country is: we never do a thing the way it should be done. Everything is some kind of transaction, just some self-centered transaction.
And another poster wrote of his internal conflict:

Personally, I don’t like zoos and I don’t like humans imprisoning animals. In my heart I want to smash the cages, but I don’t have the guts. Smashing them is definitely a crime.
The longest, most patient, and most carefully reasoned response to Xiaoxiaoge’s provocations came from a poster who called himself asroma13 (an Italian soccer reference). Asroma13 acknowledged that zoos can be useful, especially for novices, if they’re well managed. He explained the difference between zoos and reserves: that what a reserve primarily protects is a place. He told Xiaoxiaoge that he, asroma13, had personally posted many photographs of “environmental destruction, bird catching, and other harmful phenomena,” but that this couldn’t be the only focus of the Web site. As for Xiaoxiaoge’s charges of self-indulgence, asroma13 acknowledged that not many people took up birding or bird photography out of a conservationist impulse, and yet most people who pursued the hobby did come to favor the protection of nature. Moreover, he wrote:

If bird-watchers and bird photographers can’t indulge in the pleasures of beauty and of finding new species—if we can’t sigh with emotion at birds’ beauty—then where will we find the reasons and the passion to protect them?

It was asroma13 who, two years earlier, at the age of twenty, had created the Jiangsu Wild Bird Society. In English, he called himself Shrike. I met up with him in Nanjing on a Sunday morning, and while we were riding in a cab to the Botanical Garden, on the city’s densely forested Purple Mountain, the car radio happened to air a news report about a flock of migrant swans that the society had observed on a lake south of Nanjing. Shrike had been feeding local editors a steady stream of bird news for the last two years. “If you can get one station or newspaper to run a story, all the others will get interested, too,” he said.

Shrike was a tall, high-cheekboned, very young-looking student of biomedical engineering. He said he knew every detail of every bird species in Nanjing, and I believed him. On a cold gray day, in two very slow loops around the Botanical Garden—we were there for six hours—he induced an urban park to yield up thirty-five species. (We also encountered three feral cats near a trash dump, the only mammals I saw roaming free in my weeks in China.) Carrying a tripod-mounted camera like a small cross he bore for nature, Shrike led me back and forth through underbrush until we got a good look at a hwamei, one of China’s most charismatic and beloved songbirds. The hwamei’s plumage was a rich brown except for the crazy white spectacles from which it takes its name (literally, “painted eyebrow”). It was scratching in leaf litter like a towhee, nervously, alert to us. Elsewhere on the Purple Mountain, Shrike said, people set nets to catch hwamei, but the fence around the Botanical Garden kept poachers out.

Shrike had grown up in Nanjing, the only child of an engineering professor and a factory worker. When he was sixteen, he’d bought a pair of binoculars and said to himself, “I should go out and watch some creatures.” He wrote “ECOLOGICAL RECORDS” on the cover of a notebook and took it to the Botanical Garden. The first bird he looked at was a great tit (a colorful relative of the chickadee). Six months later, he scratched out the word “ECOLOGICAL” on his notebook and wrote “BIRD.” In 2005, via the Internet, he’d found his way to another birder, a police-academy cadet, and teamed up with him to create a forum that became the Jiangsu Wild Bird Society. The group now has about two hundred members, including twenty whom Shrike described as “very active,” but, unlike its Shanghai cousin, it doesn’t officially exist. “Our joke about ourselves is that we are an underground organization that’s been exposed everywhere,” Shrike said. “More and more people in the city know about us now, because of all the news coverage. Sometimes, now, when we’re out birding, people will go by, and we’ll hear them say to each other, ‘Oh, they’re birding.’ ”

Besides pollution and habitat loss, the biggest threat to birds in China is the widespread illegal netting and poisoning of them for use as food. In certain ancient cities, including Nanjing, wild birds are also commonly sold as pets or for release at festivals by Buddhists who believe that freeing caged animals brings good karma. (A nun at a monastery outside Nanjing told me that the monks aren’t picky about what kind of animals are released; quantity is all that matters.) According to Shrike, the laws against selling wild birds can’t be enforced without risking “social instability,” and so he and his group were trying to educate the buyers instead. “Our message in our promotions is ‘If you love birds, don’t trap them—let them fly free in the sky,’ ” he said. “We also tell people about all the parasites and viruses they can get. We try to persuade them, but we threaten them, too!”

Shrike agreed, rather unhappily, to take me to Nanjing’s bird market. There, in a maze of alleys north of the Qinhuai River, we saw freshly caught skylarks beating themselves against the bars of cages. We saw a boy taming a sparrow on a leash by stroking its head. We saw tall cones of bird shit. Least disturbing to me were the cages of budgies and munias that had possibly been bred in captivity. Next-least disturbing were the colorful exotics—fulvettas, leafbirds, yuhinas—that had been extracted from some beleaguered southern forest and spirited to Nanjing. I hated to see them here, but they looked only half real, because I didn’t know them in their native habitat. It was like the difference between seeing some outlandish stranger in a porn flick and seeing your best friend: the most upsetting captives were the most familiar—the grosbeaks, the thrushes, the sparrows. I was shocked by how much smaller and altogether more ragged and diminished they looked in cages than they had in the Botanical Garden. It was just as Shrike had told Xiaoxiaoge: what a nature reserve protected was a place. Almost as much as the animal was in the place, the place was in the animal.

The two most popular wild birds in Nanjing, both of them singers, were the tiny, jewel-like Japanese white-eye and the unfortunate hwamei. Newly caught songbirds sold for as little as a dollar-fifty apiece, but after a year of training and taming a single bird might fetch three hundred dollars. The white-eyes were housed in elegant, reasonably spacious cages in which it was possible to imagine, or hope, that incarceration felt something like house arrest. Most of the hwameis I saw, though, were being raised in grim, solid-sided wooden cells, barely big enough for the animal to turn around in. There was a grille of bars in front through which the hwameis peered out in their white spectacles, silently, while their cash value appreciated.

The first thing David Xu did with his new golf clubs was lend them back to me. We were finishing up another long day (“Work first, then pleasure”) with a visit to the older of Ningbo’s two golf courses. Though the air was getting worse by the hour, we were finally in a pretty part of town. Suddenly, the roads were less crowded, the agriculture a little more optional-looking, the detritus of construction discreetly hidden rather than being dumped by the curb, the billboards promising developments with names like Tuscany Lake Valley. China in general, in its headlong pursuit of money, with fabulous millionaires and a vast underclass and a dismantled social safety net, and with a central government obsessed with security and skilled at exploiting nationalism to quiet its critics, and with economic and environmental regulation entrusted to incestuous consortia of businesses and local governments, had already been striking me as the most Republican place I’d ever been. And here, nestled between a strictly protected montane forest and the bright-blue freshwater expanses of Dong Qian Hu—literally, East Money Lake—was Ningbo Delson Green World Golf Club.

The course had been built by a retired businessman who, in 1995, had been flying from city to city in China, looking for something to do with his wealth. On a jet bound for Ningbo, he’d dropped his glasses on the floor; the man who’d picked them up turned out to be Ningbo’s mayor. Ningbo had recently decided that it needed a golf course, and it was willing to sell a chunk of forest preserve, at an attractive price, to get one built.

The club’s general director, a handsome woman named Grace Peng, showed us around on an electric cart. The fairways were narrow and green and surrounded by a zoysia-like grass that turned almost white in winter. Rippling blond knolls receded into the haze like desert sand dunes; the caddies, most of them female, had white cloths wound over their hats and around their necks, T. E. Lawrence-style. We saw three groups of players on the front nine and none on the back nine. “Golf in China is still for rich people and businessmen—it’s very private,” Peng said. Life membership cost sixty thousand dollars; for a million more, you could buy a villa in an adjoining gated compound. Peng said that many of the two hundred and fifty life members, including the factory owner who’d given me the golf clubs, played here seldom or never. A few, though, came as often as five times a week and had single-digit handicaps. At the course’s highest point, up by the forest preserve, we watched three regulars tee off on a long and unforgiving hole. One of them hooked his drive across the undulating fairway and into gnarly underbrush, and Peng called out to him, “Ha, ha! Not very good!”

I’d intended to take David Xu to the course’s driving range and give him a lesson with his new clubs, but as soon as Peng suggested that I play some actual holes myself, I lost all interest in pedagogy. A caddie set about peeling the plastic wrappers off our clubs while a clerk at the rental counter rummaged for golf shoes big enough to fit me. Peng pointed out the new clubhouse that was being built next door to the very comfortable, ten-year-old existing one. “Rich people in Ningbo are quite young,” she explained. “It’s not like in the U.S., where rich people tend to be older. Things in China change so fast, you have to build quickly. You have to renew your stuff very quickly to catch the new people.”

Xu, Miss Wang, and I followed the caddie to the tenth hole. It was a parfive dogleg that required a scary tee shot over water. I surveyed the empty dunelike hillocks and, beyond them, the jagged ridgeline—a faint black cutout. The driver that the caddie handed me was candy-red, gleaming, as light as air. And this, I realized, was golf as it was supposed to be: exotic scenery, brand-new top-of-the-line clubs, and not a soul on the back nine except me and a retinue that consisted of two people being paid by me directly and a third being paid by the government to be nice to me. Xu, Miss Wang, and the caddie stood apart at a respectful distance. I could feel them willing me to excel, and I was overcome with a sense of responsibility to excel. To—for once in my life—not overswing. To let the club do the work. To keep my head down and rotate through my hips. I took a couple of practice rips with the virgin red driver. Then I creamed the ball down the center of the distant fairway.

“Nice-uh!” the caddie cried.

“Jonathan, you’re really good!” Xu said.

It was my habit, as a golfer, to follow any strong drive with eight or ten atrocious hacks, and I did nearly whiff my next two shots, with a three-wood, at Ningbo Delson Green World Golf Club. My fourth shot, however, rocketed to within eighty yards of the green, and I dropped my pitch right on top of the flag.

“Nice-uh!” the caddie said.

The irons I’d been given seemed fantastically well balanced. They felt like fine surgical tools. On the eleventh hole, I three-putted for a double bogey, but not a bad-feeling double bogey. I now deeply regretted having given the clubs to Xu. My tee shot on the par-three twelfth drifted right—“Slice-uh!” the caddie cried—but there was plenty of springy grass to work with, and I carded an easy four. I was looking forward, literally, to the thirteenth tee.

“Jonathan,” Xu said gently, “I think we have to go now.”

I gave him a stricken look. I knew we had plans for dinner with his boss, but I couldn’t believe that the best golf of my life was ending after only three holes. I pressed my putter on Xu and told him to try it, to try putting, to try golf. He placed his hands on the grip experimentally and began to giggle. I dropped a ball ten feet from the flag. He took a few wild, poking swings at it and then pulled the club up to his face and did some more giggling. I suggested that he set up closer to the ball. He took another swipe at it, as if it were a small animal he wanted to scare but not kill. The ball moved a few inches. Xu covered his face and giggled helplessly. Then, gathering himself, he struck the ball harder. It squirted directly at the hole, hit the pin, and stuck there. Xu emitted a thin, high-pitched scream and doubled over, giggling hysterically.

We didn’t say much as we drove back into the congested center of Ningbo. I looked out dully at the prolonged pre-dusk, the ground-level objects already twilit, the sun still well up in the sky, apricot-colored, safe to stare at. With construction and traffic and commerce stretching out in all directions—everybody in China still going at it with admirable industry, if not exactly optimism—I was pierced again by the feeling I’d had on my first night in Shanghai. But what I’d wanted to describe then as advancedness was, I decided now, more like simple lateness: the sadness of modernity, the period of prolonged unsettling illumination before nightfall.

The puffin’s maker, Ji, had grown up in Subei, not far from the Yancheng nature reserve. His parents had met as teen-agers in Nanjing just before the Cultural Revolution. Like so many young city people of their generation, they’d been sent to the countryside to learn the value of labor from peasants. In Subei, they built a hut out of mud and straw, leaving slits for windows. Ji was born in 1969 and was raised by his grandparents in Nanjing for two years, but his mother missed him and brought him back to Subei. Every year, in early spring, after the family pig had been killed and eaten, the family became too hungry to do anything but lie in bed for weeks at a time, subsisting on congee, waiting for the wheat harvest.

When Ji was fourteen, he applied for one of three hundred openings at the local high school and came in at No. 302 on a list of fifteen hundred applicants. Three students ahead of him were disqualified, however, and so he squeaked in. A year later, he squeaked into a better high school in Nanjing, and two years after that he squeaked into the University of Chengdu. There he was swept up in the student reform movement, marching in the street, protesting against corruption, and was fortunate—again—not to be in Beijing in June, 1989, for the Tiananmen Square massacre. Like many other talented students of that time, he turned his attention from politics to business and ended up working in the toy division of a provincial import-export corporation. In 2001, he and his wife borrowed money from friends, obtained a letter of credit from Hallmark Cards, and struck out on their own. They now own four factories and employ two thousand people. Their customers include Hallmark, Gund, and Russ Berrie—the top of the market—and Ji was recently named a Model Citizen by his local government, in the category of Labor-Intensive Industry.

“I am the most lucky guy,” Ji said. He had agreed to show me around his headquarters, provided I didn’t use his real name. (“Why would I want to advertise?” he said. “Whenever I want to expand, all I have to do is mention that we’re the supplier for Hallmark Cards.”) His offices were situated beside a pleasant, tree-lined, concrete-bottomed river in an industrial suburb in eastern China. There was a happy bounce in Ji’s step as he took me around the small production facilities he maintains there. In the last four years, most of his production has moved inland, to Anhui Province, where, he said, workers will accept substantially lower wages to be closer to their families. Ji obviously benefits financially from lower wages and lower attrition rates, but he believes that society benefits, too—that marriages are strengthened and children better cared for when the parents live close to home, and that bringing factories to rural workers is a more sustainable economic model for China than bringing rural workers to factories.

Ji showed me a robotic machine of his own design which cuts fake fur with lasers. For a small-volume item like the puffin, the fabric is cut by hand. Workers in the design department demonstrated how the pieces are machine-stitched together, with the backing side outermost, how the pointed plastic stems of the animal’s eyes are pushed through the fur and cinched with washers, and how the animal is then dramatically turned inside out—dull fabric transformed into furry friend. Polyester fluff is stuffed into its head through a hole in its back, the hole sutured by hand, the seams trimmed, the fur brushed, and a Daphne’s tag applied. The whole process takes an average worker about twenty minutes. Ji presented me with three finished puffins, one of them embroidered with my brother’s name.

“I imagine that a panda would be a popular head cover in China,” I said idly.

“In China?” Ji laughed and shook his head. “The Chinese want maybe a bald eagle for their head cover. Or the face of George Bush.”

I was feeling a certain guilty-liberal disappointment at not having found more industrial horror upstream from my puffin. Its American seller was an animal nut and its Chinese maker a Model Citizen. Even the pollution aspect wasn’t obviously terrible. A week earlier, in Nanjing, I’d visited two factories belonging to Nice Gain, an industry leader in fake fur (or, as it’s known in the trade, “pile fabric”), and learned of certain advantages that synthetic fibres have over natural fibres. Nice Gain’s fake fur begins as big cotton-like bales of acrylic fibre, imported from Japan, which is carded into fluffy rope and fed into computerized Jacquards that knit it into wide, strokable flows of fur. The primary raw material in acrylic fibre is petroleum—no thirsty cotton fields; no overgrazing; and a better use of oil than burning by Jeep S.U.V.s—and the dyeing process is much cleaner with acrylics than with wool or cotton, which are contaminated with miscellaneous proteins. “If the dye coming out is dirty, we can’t export the product; it means you never reached it with the dye,” Nice Gain’s president, Tong Zheng, told me. Because Zheng, like Ji, was at the top of the market and could afford to run a clean operation, he bought his natural fibres pre-colored and didn’t ask his suppliers any questions about the dyeing. (“The one thing I know,” he said, “is that if you do it to code you’re the least competitive player in the market. As a good citizen, you soon find yourself out of business.”) My puffin’s fur was all acrylic, and if the acrylic-fibre plant in Japan was anything like the acrylic-fibre plant I’d seen being managed by teenagers in Cixi, there were no great environmental horrors to be found there, either. The puffin was evidently more of a luxury item than I’d known.

I asked Ji how he felt, personally, about animals, given that his business consisted of making toy images of them. The story he chose to tell was about one of the pigs his family had had when he was a boy. This pig, he said, had been skilled at burrowing holes through the mud and straw of its pen and escaping. Ji’s father had finally become angry and pierced the pig’s mouth with three or four iron rings; and the pig never escaped again. “Now it’s a joke I have with my kids,” Ji said. “ ‘You’d better not get a ring in your nose or your belly button, because it will make me remember my pig!’ ”

Nose rings are a worry because his kids are growing up in North America. Ji and his wife had always wanted to raise them in, as he put it, a “Western environment,” and the final push into a new hemisphere came two years ago, shortly after Ji was named a Model Citizen. Because of China’s population policy, one thing a Model Citizen really can’t do is have more than one child. Ji already had a boy from a previous marriage, and his wife had a daughter from her previous marriage. They were now expecting their first child as a couple, which would be Ji’s second. One night, when his wife was six months pregnant, the two of them decided that she should go to Canada to have the baby. Their child was born in Vancouver three months later; and Ji was able to remain a Model Citizen.

There are two competing theories about the connection between economic growth and environmental protection in developing nations. One, which happens to be very convenient to business interests, holds that societies generally start worrying about the environment only after being allowed to pollute their way to middle-class wealth, leisure, and entitlement. The other theory notes that developmental maturity hasn’t exactly stopped Western societies from overconsuming resources and laying waste to nature; this theory’s proponents, who tend to be apocalyptic worriers, tear their hair at the thought of China, India, and Indonesia following the Western model.

Proponents of the “growth first, then environment” theory may take heart at how closely the explosion of China’s G.D.P. was followed by the emergence of Western-style nature-lovers. The problem, however, is that China has so little good land and is changing so quickly. A new generation may be learning conservation, but not as fast as habitat is disappearing. Already China’s national parks are being loved to death by an increasingly mobile middle class. In North America, you can still take schoolkids to a nature center one busload at a time and let them spend a day or a week watching animals. In Shanghai, where the population will soon hit twenty million, there is only one accessible nature reserve—Chongming Dongtan, on an alluvial island in the Yangtze. The reserve is well managed but heavily stressed by fishermen and upstream pollution. The entire northern third of it is engulfed by a bird-hostile invasive rice grass (according to local legend, the grass was introduced at the behest of Premier Zhou Enlai, who had asked his experts to find him a plant that could increase the size of China), and an enormous wetland park, containing a “vacation villa zone” and “wetland golf,” is under construction along the western boundary. Beginning in 2010, a system of bridges and tunnels will link the island directly to the heart of Shanghai. It will be possible to bus every kid in Shanghai to Chongming Dongtan for a day in nature; but the buses would be lined up bumper to bumper across the Yangtze.

Successful Chinese conservation efforts today tend to sidestep the populace altogether and appeal directly to the government’s self-interest. In Shanghai, Yifei Zhang, the journalist-turned-W.W.F. staffer, is trying to get the city government to think about its maximum sustainable population and its future sources of drinking water. The city is currently planning to rely on the Yangtze estuary, but rising sea levels threaten to make it too salty to use, and Yifei is pressing the city to develop an alternative source by cleaning up the tributary Huangpu River and restoring its watershed—which, as a fringe benefit, would create new wildlife habitat. “We never despair, because we don’t have high expectations,” Yifei said. Upriver from Shanghai, where hundreds of lakes have been permanently severed from the Yangtze, the W.W.F. in 2002 set a goal of persuading the government of Hubei to reconnect just one of them. “Nobody believed it was possible,” Yifei said. “It was just a dream—a castle in the air. But we set up a demo site, and after two or three years we got the local government to try opening the sluice gates seasonally, to let the fish fry into the lake. And it worked! We were then able to give small amounts of money to local governments to set up pilot programs. We started with a goal of one lake. As of now, seventeen lakes have been reconnected.”

In Beijing, I met an exceptionally effective grassroots activist named Haixiang Zhou. Zhou had been doing serious amateur bird photography for twenty years—he felt he’d been a national pioneer in this regard—but had come to activism only recently. In the fall of 2005, he’d heard news that avian flu had broken out near his childhood home, in Liaoning Province, and that officials were claiming the flu was spread by wild birds. Fearing an unnecessary slaughter, Zhou had taken a leave from his job and hurried to Liaoning, where he found that waterfowl and migrating cranes were dying from more ordinary causes—hunting, poisoning, netting.

Zhou wore glasses so big that they seemed to cover half his face. “If an N.G.O. wants to do anything here, it has to be in coöperation with the government,” he told me. “Bird-watchers and conservationists can investigate things, but to actually get anything done you have to have an angle. Local people always want more development, while the government officially wants sustainable development and protection for the environment. Since resources are very limited, officials are happy if you can help them to show that they really are doing what they’re officially committed to doing. When an environmental project is done well, county leaders get a lot of positive feedback and gain a lot of face.”

On a laptop, Zhou showed me photographs of dignitaries smiling on a wildlife observation platform they’d built in his home town. Zhou is now working on a new project at the Laotie Mountain Nature Reserve on the Liaodong Peninsula. Every fall, the entire migratory-bird population of northeast China funnels through the peninsula on its way south, and there, on public land, local poachers put up thousands of nets to capture and kill them. Most highly prized are the big raptor species, many of them endangered or threatened. A few of the birds are eaten locally, Zhou said, but most are sent to southern provinces, where they’re considered a delicacy. Zhou and his daughter, a volunteer at the reserve, are collecting data to present to the central government, so that it can coördinate local policy. His photographs showed wardens chasing poachers by daylight and by headlight. They showed trees that the poachers had chopped down to block the wardens’ trucks. They showed confiscated motorcycles. A room neck-deep with balled-up nets of every color—a single morning’s haul by the wardens. Cages of small birds left behind as bait for bigger birds. Tree trunks lashed vertically to the top of other trees, elevating nets to eagle height. Smaller eagle-traps hung from high branches and weighted with logs. House-sized nets dotted with stricken doves, white-tailed eagles, Saker falcons. Birds still alive with their wings compound-fractured, bone sticking out, the angles gruesome. A confiscated mesh laundry bag stuffed with falcons and owls, many dead, many not, all mashed together like dirty underwear. A poacher in handcuffs, wearing a nice shirt and new sneakers, his face digitally smudged. Sweat beading on the face of a warden extricating a falcon from a net. A pile of forty-seven dead hawks and eagles, each one decapitated by poachers to keep it from biting, all of them confiscated in one morning. A smaller pile of bloody heads found scattered on the ground the same morning.

“The people who do this aren’t poor,” Zhou said. “It’s not subsistence—it’s custom. My goal is to educate people and try to change the custom. I want to teach people that birds are their natural wealth, and I want to promote eco-tourism as an alternative livelihood.”

The migrant birds that make it unscathed past Laotie Mountain are mostly bound, of course, for southeast Asia: a region well on its way to being clear-cut and strip-mined into one vast muddy pit, since China itself is hopelessly short on natural resources to supply the factories that supply us. The Chinese people may bear the brunt of Chinese pollution, but the trauma to biodiversity is being reëxported around the world. And it does seem like rather a lot to ask of the Chinese people that, while working to safeguard Laotie Mountain and achieve breathable air and drinkable water and sustainable development, they also pay close attention to the devastation of southeast Asia, Siberia, central Africa, and the Amazon Basin. It’s remarkable enough that people like Shrike and Haixiang Zhou and Yifei Zhang exist at all.

“To see something being destroyed and not be able to do anything about it, it’s sad sometimes,” Shrike said to me. We were standing by a badly polluted river outside Nanjing, surveying a landscape of new factories in what had been wetland two years earlier. But there was still a small area that hadn’t been developed, and Shrike wanted me to see it. ♦

Jonathan Franzen, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, is the author of, most recently, the novel “Purity.”